Browsing by Author "Boyle, Michael"
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- ItemOpen AccessBALANCING PRIVACY AND AWARENESS FOR TELECOMMUTERS USING BLUR FILTRATION(2003-02-14) Neustaedter, Carman; Greenberg, Saul; Boyle, MichaelAlways-on video provides rich awareness for co-workers separated by distance, yet it has the potential to threaten privacy as sensitive details may be broadcast to others. This threat increases for telecommuters who work at home and connect to office-based colleagues using video. One technique for balancing privacy and awareness is blur filtration, which blurs video to hide sensitive details while still giving the viewer a sense of what is going on. While other researchers found that blur filtration mitigates privacy concerns in low-risk office settings, we do not know if it works for riskier situations that can occur in telecommuting settings. Using a controlled experiment, we evaluated blur filtration for its effectiveness in balancing privacy with awareness for typical home situations faced by telecommuters. Participants viewed five video scenes containing a telecommuter at ten levels of blur, where scenes ranged from little to extreme privacy risk. They then answered awareness and privacy questions about these scenes. Our results show that blur filtration is only able to balance privacy with awareness for mundane home scenes. The implication is that blur filtration by itself does not suffice for privacy protection in video-based telecommuting situations; other privacy-protecting strategies are required.
- ItemOpen AccessCollabrary Shared Dictionary v1.0.17 - Programming Paradigm and Wire Protocol(2003-11-04) Boyle, MichaelThe Collabrary Shared Dictionary is a COM object class that can be used to rapidly prototype groupware applications. As the name suggests, it uses a dictionary programming model, where the dictionary contents are shared among the computers and processes involved in a groupware application. This document describes the basic programming paradigm employed in the shared dictionary and provides details as to the wire protocol used by it. This document is intended so that other developers and build software that directly interoperates with the Collabrary shared dictionary.
- ItemOpen AccessCUSTOMIZABLE PHYSICAL INTERFACES FOR INTERACTING WITH CONVENTIONAL APPLICATIONS(2002-03-15) Greenberg, Saul; Boyle, MichaelMost of today's complex software products rely solely on graphical controls (GUI widgets) for user interaction. However GUI widgets can be difficult to find and use. Physical controls are often simpler to manipulate and arrange sensibly about one's workspace. Thus, we wish to link a physical interface to existing commercial applications, e.g., an office productivity suite. To do so we must tap in to its functionality in ways that do not require access to its source code. We present our widget picker/taps package. It gives developers access to the functionality of an existing application via the semantics of its GUI widgets. This approach works well with many present-day commercial applications, unlike two other common approaches: hooking into application-specific APIs, and simulating raw user input. We present examples that illustrate how this package is used to link existing application widgets to physical controls. Our implementation prompts a number of issues relevant to makers of windowing systems and GUI toolkits.
- ItemOpen AccessDisplay and Presence Disparity in Mixed Presence Groupware(2003-09-02) Tang, Anthony; Boyle, Michael; Greenberg, SaulMixed Presence Groupware (MPG) supports both co-located and distributed participants, working over a shared visual workspace. It does this by connecting multiple single-display groupware workspaces together through a shared data structure. Our implementation and observations of MPG systems exposes two problems. The first is display disparity, where connecting heterogeneous tabletop and vertical displays introduces issues in how one seats people around the virtual table and how one orients work artifacts. The second is presence disparity, where a participant's perception of the presence of others is markedly different depending on whether a collaborator is co-located or remote. This is likely caused by inadequate consequential communication between remote participants, which in turn disrupts group collaborative and communication dynamics. To mitigate display and presence disparity problems, we determine virtual seating positions and replace conventional telepointers with digital arm shadows that extend from a person's side of the table to their pointer location.
- ItemOpen AccessTHE EFFECTS OF CAPTURE CONDITIONS ON THE CAMSHIFT FACE TRACKER(2001-12-12) Boyle, MichaelFace tracking - the continuous monitoring of head position, orientation, and geometry - has numerous practical applications for human-computer interaction, such as a perceptual form of multi-modal input. There are several non-invasive and computationally inexpensive techniques for face tracking that draw upon algorithms from computer vision. Of them, Bradski's CAMSHIFT algorithm is appealing because it requires minimal training. These techniques are particularly attractive in light of the growing installed base of fast desktop computers and cheap, low-end desktop digital video cameras. Low-end cameras, however, have characteristics that make them a poor fit for some such face tracking algorithms. In this paper, I introduce the problem of face tracking, provide an overview of the operation of CAMSHIFT as an example of a non-invasive vision-based face tracking algorithms, and describe my experiences attempting to employ video obtained from a low-end desktop digital video camera source in face tracking. I conclude this paper by offering conclusions and recommendations drawn upon my experiences.
- ItemOpen AccessTHE EFFECTS OF FILTERED VIDEO ON AWARENESS AND PRIVACY(2000-06-08) Boyle, Michael; Edwards, Christopher; Greenberg, SaulVideo-based media spaces are designed to support casual interaction between intimate collaborators. Yet transmitting video is fraught with privacy concerns. Some researchers suggest that the video stream be 'filtered' to mask out potentially sensitive information. While a variety of filtering techniques exist, they have not been evaluated for how well they safeguard privacy. In this paper, we analyze how a blur and a pixelize video filter might impact both awareness and privacy in a media space. Each filter is considered at nine different levels of fidelity, ranging from heavily applied filter levels that mask almost all information, to lightly applied filters that reveal almost everything. We examined how well observers of several filtered video scenes extract particular awareness cues: the number of actors; their posture (moving, standing, seated); their gender; the visible objects (basic to detailed); and how available people look (their busyness, seriousness and approachability). We also examined the privacy-preserving potential of each filter level in the context of common workplace activities. Our results suggest that the blur filter, and to a lesser extent the pixelize filter, have a level suitable for providing awareness information while safeguarding privacy.
- ItemOpen AccessGROUPLAB AT SKIGRAPH(2000-03-21) Boyle, Michael; Kaasten, Shaun; Rounding, Michael; Tam, James; Zanella, Ana; Greenberg, Saul; Carpendale, Sheelagh; Maurer, FrankThe Western Computer Graphics Symposium, nicknamed 'SkiGraph', is an annual professional meeting comprising mostly graphics researchers and their graduate students from Western Canada. In 2000, several Western Canadian researchers in Human Computer Interaction: Saul Greenberg (U.Calgary), Carl Gutwin (U. Saskatchewan), Kori Inkpen (Simon Fraser) and Sheelagh Carpendale (U. Calgary) agreed to use Skigraph as a way to get themselves and their graduate students together, where students would present papers describing their research. Because it was important for all graduate students to share their ideas, the papers written could range from identification of research areas and tentative proposals of research problems all the way to detailed results from mature work. This research report collects five research papers by students at Grouplab to SkiGraph (Grouplab is the laboratory for human computer interaction research at the University of Calgary). The papers are listed below. In all cases, the students are the first author followed by faculty members who have supervised or contributed to the work in one way or another. Individual papers may be cited directly by including the following information.
- ItemOpen AccessGroupware Plug-ins: A Case Study of Extending Collaboration Functionality through Media Items(2006-02-23) McEwan, Gregor; Greenberg, Saul; Rounding, Michael; Boyle, MichaelGroupware normally offers only fixed functionality, which can be a poor match to the actual needs of particular group. We argue that groupware should be extensible by third party developers, and describe groupware plug-ins as a method that enables this. Using the Community Bar (CB) as a case study, we illustrate an easy-to-program extensible groupware architecture. Unlike single user plug-ins, CB groupware plug-ins automatically share and populate a distributed data structure, using a distributed Model View Controller pattern to simplify programming. Several 3rd party plugins illustrate what people can create in practice.
- ItemOpen AccessA Lexicon for Privacy in Video Media Spaces(2003-06-12) Boyle, Michael; Greenberg, SaulVideo media spaces are an excellent crucible for the study of privacy. Their design affords opportunities for misuses, prompts ethical questions, and engenders grave concerns from both users and non-users. Despite considerable discussion of the privacy problems uncovered in prior work, questions remain as to how to design a privacy-preserving video media space and how to evaluate its effect on privacy. The problem is much more deeply rooted than this, however. Privacy is an enormous concept and from it emerges an overwhelming torrent of interrelated words. In this article, we draw from resources in environmental psychology and CSCW to build a broadly- and deeply-rooted holistic description of this nebulous thing, privacy. Beyond this, we relate the vocabulary back to the real and hard problem of designing privacy preserving video media spaces. In doing so, we facilitate exploration and discussion of the privacy-design relationship.
- ItemOpen AccessMOVING BETWEEN PERSONAL DEVICES AND PUBLIC DISPLAYS(1998-08-01) Greenberg, Saul; Boyle, MichaelWe are investigating how people move from individual to group work through the use of both personal digital assistants (PDAs) and a shared public display. Our scenario of this work covers the following activities. First, individuals can create "personal" notes on their PDAs. Second, when individuals meet in real time, they can selectively "publicize" notes by moving them to a shared public display. Third, the group can manipulate personal and public items in real time through both PDAs and the shared public display, where the notes contained on both PDAs and public display are automatically synchronized. Finally, people leave a meeting with a (more or less) common record of their activity. We describe a fully implemented system called SharedNotes that illustrates how people move through this scenario. We also highlight a variety of design issues.
- ItemOpen AccessRapidly Prototyping Multimedia Groupware(2005-05-09) Boyle, Michael; Greenberg, SaulMultimedia groupware systems provide rich support for distributed team work. Yet effective design of these systems is difficult because they must cater to complex human and social factors. Rapid prototyping partially mitigates this, for it allows designers to build, deploy, test and quickly evolve design ideas. The problem is that multimedia groupware is hard to prototype because distributed multimedia systems are complex to implement. To solve this problem, we offer the Collabrary, a toolkit specifically designed for easy prototyping of multimedia groupware. The Collabrary blends real-time streaming multimedia, asynchronous shared application state, and novel multimedia analysis and manipulation algorithms to provide rich functionality for distributed teamwork. Implementing core functionality - multimedia capture, analysis, manipulation, transmission and rendering - is trivial. The Collabrary also affords lessons that inform the design of universally accepted toolkits for building distributed multimedia systems: we illustrate why toolkits should be accessible for learnability, lightweight so easy ideas are easy to build, and flexible so that novel unanticipated ideas are possible to implement.
- ItemOpen AccessA SOFTWARE TOOL TO GREATLY REDUCE THE INSTRUCTIONAL TIME NEEDED TO IMPLEMENT THE SCIENCE GENIUS RAP PROGRAMME(2016-12-20) Fakourfar, Omid; Tse, Edward; Tang, Anthony; Boyle, MichaelUrban youth of color from low socioeconomic status are generally known to be less engaged in STEM in the United States. On the other hand, the same demographic is usually engaged in hip-hop culture and rap music. Emdin et. al. (2016) have introduced a 12-week teaching model through a hip-hop based science programme which encourages students to come up with hip-hop songs by connecting their everyday life to scientific concepts. This method has shown considerable promise: students have used it mainly as a way of disclosing their emotion while learning scientific concepts at the same time. However, the length of this programme could dissuade teachers from adopting this method. In this work, we introduce a software tool to facilitate the same process and achieve many of its outcomes all within a single instructional period, i.e., an hour.
- ItemOpen AccessTracking Visual Differences for Generation and Playback of User-Customized Notifications(2005-04-28) Greenberg, Saul; Boyle, MichaelNotification systems alert individuals or groups of changing information that is of interest to them. The problem is that it is difficult for people to gather notifications of personal interest; they must either rely on the generic offerings of the information provider, or construct their own services through coding. In this paper, we contribute a simple yet effective method that lets people create custom notification elements by image assembly, where notifications are triggered through visual differencing. First, after finding information of interest on a web page, the person constructs a visual collage selected from regions on the page. These are regions of the fully rendered bitmap view of the page i.e., they are not coupled to the page s underlying HTML markup. The composite image created from this collage will be used to assemble a notification of relevant changes to that web page. Second, the person specifies one or more regions on the page that will be compared for visual differences over time, and how often the page should be revisited to check for these differences. The system will automatically generate a notification (the composite image plus a title and timestamp) when differences go beyond a user provided threshold. Finally, the person can view the notifications in several ways: as only the most recently changed version (to illustrate current state), or as an image history that can be either browsed individually or played back as a continuous video stream (to see changes over time).
- ItemOpen AccessUBIQUITOUS AWARENESS SPACES(2001-02-06) Boyle, MichaelIn this paper, I describe the present course of research we are pursuing related to the design, development, deployment and evaluation of ubiquitous and reactive environments for supporting casual interactions among intimate collaborators. I begin by briefly describing the work done in this area by us and by others and give some motivation for the design decisions made. I then step back from the problem to re-evaluate the designs, and question the suitability of ubiquitous computing for supporting tele-awareness and facilitation of informal interaction. I examine problems relating to privacy in the ubiquitous media space, and expose them as failures resulting from the drive for a seamless user interface. I conclude by generalizing these problems to other applications of ubiquitous computing, and revisit previously held tenets about how reactive environments should be designed and question their sanctity in light of the problems identified.